Clinical Legal Education on the Ground: A Conversation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COMMUNITY LEGAL ASSISTANCE SERVICES FOR SASKATOON INNER CITY (CLASSIC) is acommunity-based legal clinic in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.CLASSIC, which was established in 2007 through the work of a small group of law students, hosts the University of Saskatchewan College of Law's Intensive Clinical Law program, providing full-time clinical placements to approximately ten upper-year law students each term in its Walk-In Advocacy Clinic program.Clinical students obtain a full semester's worth of academic credits: they work at CLASSIC Monday to Thursday each week and attend an academic clinical seminar on Friday mornings.The clinical program runs throughout the year in three terms: fall, winter, and summer.CLASSIC also provides multiple pro bono placements for law students who want to volunteer.CLASSIC is structured as a not-for-profit organization with a community board.Funding has been an ongoing struggle: the clinic receives no legal aid funding and is funded through a wide (and tenuous) set of grants from organizations including the Law Foundation of Saskatchewan, the provincial Ministry of Justice, and the College of Law.CLASSIC's mission is to work "toward social justice with lowincome, marginalized Saskatchewan residents, with a commitment to Indigenous peoples, through a legal clinic that is guided by the needs of the community.This engages law and interdisciplinary students through experiential learning, providing insights into the cultural and social reality of law and fosters an ethic of social justice."1CLASSIC has served well over ten thousand clients in the areas of housing law, immigration and refugee law, prison law, criminal law, human rights law, and many more areas.In the fall of 2018, Clinical Law professor Sarah Buhler sat down with four CLASSIC staff members (Executive Director Chantelle Johnson, Supervising Lawyers Nicholas Blenkinsop and Leif Jensen, and Legal Assistant Kim Pidskalny) to discuss their perspectives on issues relating to the challenges and rewards of clinical legal education.The conversation (edited for length and clarity) is reproduced here. Sarah: Thanks everyone for agreeing to participate in this conversation about clinical legal education from the perspective of supervising lawyers, frontline administrative staff and clinic leadership. First, I ask each person to introduce themselves and their connections to clinical legal education and CLASSIC.Chantelle (Executive Director): My name is Chantelle Johnson.I'm the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.065 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.073 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.038 | 0.055 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.037 |
| Research integrity | 0.054 | 0.117 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".